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Thursday, November 1, 2012

Gone

[Updated May 2, 2013]

Notwithstanding the nearly disastrous consequences of Willow’s escapism
in Wrecked, and notwithstanding her
conversation with Willow at the end of Wrecked,
Buffy finds herself drawn back into an even more extreme form of escapism in Gone. Some viewers were frustrated with
Buffy’s plunge back into the depths, and Gone
is generally a low-rated episode. But as I said before, the Magic Box sequence
in Life Serial was important in
foreshadowing a theme of S6 and we’re beginning to see that Buffy hasn’t yet
figured out how to “satisfy a customer [in this case herself] with a task that
resists solving.” This strikes me as very true to life for those suffering from
depression.

If one is really depressed, I guess it can seem like a good idea to take
a free pass from adulthood. Like the Trio (and Warren emphasizes it by telling
Jonathan and Andrew “You guys are so immature!”), Buffy’s entire goal in Gone is to do juvenile things while
avoiding responsibility. Her conversation with Willow at the end may be a small
step up from where she was at the end of OMWF,
in the sense that she’s now accepting life itself, but she hasn’t reached the
stage of accepting adult responsibilities. Spike drives home the message: “Free
of life? Got another name for that. Dead.”

We’re obviously supposed to dislike Doris (the social worker), but
Buffy’s behavior towards her is pretty hard to justify. It’s not that much
different from the way Willow and Amy treated the people at the Bronze in Smashed. The big difference is that the
patrons in the Bronze were entirely innocent, while Doris certainly was not.
She was officious, meddling, unsympathetic and, despite her protestations, not
all that interested in Dawn’s well-being – note that she never even spoke to
Dawn, who is 15 and capable of having an informed opinion.

There was plenty in Gone to
excite both sides of the Spike Wars. On the one hand, Spike continues to insist
that Buffy “belongs in the dark with him”: “… he's always going on and
on about being the only one that understands me. 'We're alike, you and me. Birds
of a bloody feather.'” That can easily be interpreted as seducing Buffy to the
dark side.

At the same time, though, Spike
gave her the tough love advice I quoted above. He also kicked her out because
her self-destructive behavior was too nihilistic even for him.

Then there’s Willow. If I’m right
that S6 gives us a strong parallel between Buffy and her metaphorical spirit,
then we should interpret Willow’s behavior in Gone in some way consistent with Buffy’s own actions. Virtually all
we see of Willow in this episode is her determined effort to go “cold turkey” by avoiding
magic altogether. We get a number of scenes with the stereotypical behavior of
an addict in that situation: cleaning out all the magic supplies (don’t forget
the candles!); drinking all the water; shaking; temptation; etc.

This can’t be right. Buffy is
escaping from herself – escaping from life – in Gone. If Willow’s story is parallel, then we need to interpret her
behavior as escapist also. The natural consequence is that Willow’s problem is not addiction, not to magic and not to
anything else. Rather, Willow’s reaction to her binge in Wrecked is itself a form of escapism from her real problem(s).

This, I think, highlights one of
my issues with the magic/drugs metaphor. Because Wrecked and Gone rubbed
the addiction “metaphor” in our faces, most viewers took that as the actual
message. And they didn’t like it. Going forward, any viewer is likely to find
S6 pretty frustrating if the addiction metaphor is taken at face value. Much of
the criticism of S6 stems from the fact that Willow’s story plays as addiction
despite the fact that this simply can’t and doesn’t work.

Many viewers also disparaged Gone
because they criticized Xander’s behavior, or criticized the writers for making
Xander seem like an oblivious fool, for not recognizing what was happening in
Spike’s crypt. I think this criticism misses the point. Xander is so caught up
in his own concerns about his upcoming wedding (inviting D’Hoffryn?!) that he’s
ignoring Buffy’s problems and she, in turn, is ignoring his. Metaphorically,
Xander’s inability to “see” Buffy is just a way to say that he’s not
recognizing her coping problems, just as he has failed to see other things all
season. Think of Marcie in Out of Sight,
Out of Mind, where she became invisible precisely because people weren’t
noticing her; it’s a similar dynamic from a different perspective and Xander
even references that episode here.

Nor should we be surprised by Xander’s behavior even without the
metaphor. He comes from an abusive family, as has been clear for quite some
time. Kids in such families often become adept at “not seeing” the things
happening right in front of them, just as Xander misses the dynamic between
Spike and Buffy in the kitchen and in the crypt. That would be too painful for
Xander, so he doesn’t “see” it.

What’s true of Xander is also true of the episode as a whole. None of
Buffy’s friends actually see her even before she becomes invisible. They aren’t
recognizing her issues any more than Xander is. The episode therefore works on
2 levels: as Buffy’s own desire to escape from her life; and as the failure of
her friends to see what’s really wrong with her. Buffy’s words to Willow sum it
up for both, even though Buffy, as usual, takes the blame on herself:

WILLOW: Okay, I deserve the wrath
of Dawn, but ... why is she taking it out on you?
BUFFY: Because I let it happen.
WILLOW: Buffy, I was the one who-
BUFFY: Who was drowning. My best friend. And I was too wrapped up in my own
dumb life to even notice.

Trivia notes: (1) SMG was absent during most of the shooting of this
episode, I believe because she was shooting the first Scooby Doo movie, so they needed to have her on screen a minimal
amount of time. She also wanted to get her hair cut so they worked that into
the story line. (2) Dawn mentioned Kokopelli, a fertility god and a trickster
worshiped by Native Americans of the Southwest. (3) Andrew wanted their
invisibility ray to be “more ILM, less Ed Wood.” Industrial Light and Magic is
the visual effects company founded by George Lucas. Ed Wood made very low
budget genre films. (4) Willow said she deserved the “wrath of Dawn”, which is
probably a pun on the Star Trek movie The
Wrath of Khan. (5) Xander’s “Good Godfrey Cambridge” refers to an American
comedian of the ‘60s and ‘70s. (6) Xander accused Spike of trying to “mack” on
Buffy, which is American slang meaning Spike was trying to seduce her. (7)
Buffy tried to divert Ms. Kroger by pretending that Spike used the word “crib”
rather than “crypt”, the former being American slang for a house. (8) D’Hoffryn
last appeared in Something Blue. (9)
Buffy’s line “S’awright” refers to a by-now fairly obscure comic and
ventriloquist from the 50s and 60s who used the stage name Señor Wences. (10)
Willow’s expression “jump off the wagon” is American slang meaning that someone
who stopped using alcohol or drugs will start again. (11) When Buffy torments
the woman in the park as “the ghost of fashion victims past”, the reference is
to the Ghost of Christmas Past from the Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol. (12) Buffy’s
exclamation “Yahtzee” when she finds Dawn’s file on Doris’s desk refers to a
dice game of that name. (13) The scene in which Buffy causes Doris’s computer
to print the phrase “all work and no play make Doris a dull girl” is a
reference to the movie The Shining.
(14) The tune Buffy whistles as she leaves Doris’s office is “Going Through the
Motions” from OMWF. (15) Willow’s
“betcha by golly wow” comes from a song of that title by the Stylistics. (16)
Buffy’s reference to “Bizarro World” is to the Superman comics. (17) Buffy’s
“birds of a bloody feather” modifies an English idiom which means that two
things are alike. (18) Buffy’s “hey, I’m walking here” comes from the movie Midnight Cowboy. (19) Buffy’s
“unidentified flying pizza” refers to the expression “unidentified flying
object”. (20) Buffy described Xander and Anya as “Muldering out what happened”,
referring to one of the heroes of the TV series The X-Files. (21) SMG’s delivery of the single word “Wow” in
response to Xander telling her she could die has always struck me as
exceptional acting; she delivered it in exactly the right tone. (22) Warren
describes Andrew as “Tucker’s brother”, referring to the episode The Prom.

5 comments:

I love your observation about Willow's treating magic as an addiction is actually escaping from her real problem, because it jives with what I feel the writers were actually going for, and explains why she goes dark at the end of the season.

She wants the problem to be the magic, because that's easy to solve, stop using the magic.

But that's not the problem, the problem is HOW she uses magic. And that's not an easy thing to solve. It requires introspection and self honesty, which are things neither Buffy nor Willow are capable of at the moment.

It's almost as if the writers are now using metaphor as a misdirection, the obvious metaphor is magic=crack, but what's really going on is more subtle than that. Almost TOO subtle. Of course, DMP will put a dent in this view again, as Amy will "dose" Willow, and the problem goes back to being an addiction one.

While it's surprising (at least at face value) that Xander doesn't realize Buffy is in Spike's crypt, it's at least internally consistent in that Buffy doesn't think he will figure it out. Buffy's friends aren't perceptive to her, and she doesn't even expect them to be.

Of course Spike thinks the whole farce is ridiculous, as he's always been pretty perceptive and continually complains when others are not.

Unrelated: I don't know if any of the people in this corner of the internet are following Game of Thrones (TV show), but a common complaint in the fandom has been the unequal amounts of female and male nudity on the show. For instance, sex scenes will feature a fully-clothed man with a completely naked woman (see Robb and Talisa, or any brothel scene). Rewatching Buffy is evening things out for me, as Spike is about as naked as he can get and SMG isn't even on camera.

Heh, I do follow GoT, though the Y side of me isn't complaining about it. :) You're very right about Spike in S6. JM even commented a few times that he was spending an awful lot of time just wearing a sock.

1) I've always liked this episode, but that may be because I have no trouble with Buffy's depression arc...

2) Buffy's treatment of Doris is cruel (if funny), but I have always seen it as a kind of bodily echo of Willow's excesses: When Willow feels helpless, she turns to magic; here, Buffy (rightly or wrongly) feels helpless, so she makes use of the magic she's been given.

3) Yes, in times of deep depression one dreams of complete escape from one's life—invisibility gave Buffy the illusion (oops) of that, and she, well, ran with it... to Spike, among other things...

4) On one hand, it is hard to imagine anything too nihilistic for Spike, but that is only on the surface: down deep, I really think he is a romantic—he may be love's bitch, but he is once again man enough to admit it, and that means kicking Buffy out.

The idea of the cold turkey phase being a deliberate or intentional mislead on the part of the writers is a theory that has been brought up in other places yet I have my doubts on whether it was the actual intention as there doesn't seem to be any behind the scenes information to really confirm it. I'd be nice to to say the writers were clever enough to fool us all and have us believe that they were feeding us a lot of crap to hide the truth but I just can't believe it. Even if it was subtle as people here have said the fact remains that it was too subtle to really be picked up as intentional and plus it seems really defeating to your story to make people believe you were deliberately screwing up and have the gotcha reveal to not exactly exist.

SPOILERS

Looking at everything in retrospect I either believe they genuinely wanted Willow to go down the recovery path but then realized it wasn't really working so they had her bow out, which in a sense could still be tragic because she tried to recover and failed (which was at least how I read it when first watching it) or they always planned on her to go full Dark but they didn't really know how to get there or be able to get there while Buffy was working through her funk so they came up with the addiction story to buy time and maybe attempt a parallel with Buffy which as people have pointed out elsewhere ultimately led to structural problems with her arc and put hard brakes on what was a slow but steady rise to evil before picking it up again later.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

I've collected and substantially edited the original BtVS blog posts into an ebook, which is by now very significantly better than the original essays. It's available here. I continue to update the book regularly. You can get the updated version at any time by asking Amazon, though you'll lose any bookmarks or highlights if you do that.
There's also now a paperback version, available from the same link.
For links to the original posts, scroll down below.

About Me

I grew up reading all kinds of F&SF. Oddly enough, I guess, for someone with my tastes, I'd never heard of the new TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My 9 year old daughter told me about it and asked me to watch it with her.
I got hooked pretty quickly and soon moved, like most Buffy fans, to the internet for more discussion. I found a site called All Things Philosophical on Buffy, etc. and made that a home. The posts here ultimately derive from that experience, combined with re-watching the show many times. I hope everyone who reads here loves the series as much as I do.